Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"And you had no clue on this?" he asked. "No idea about this judge?"

'Clong' was the agent term, the rush of shit to the heart when you suddenly saw you'd screwed up. Sure, she knew. There was that remark about messing around with a judge which Feaver had made after the first time they'd seen Walter.

"Anybody else hear about that?" McManis asked. He was fully focused, intent. She drummed her fingers. She had told Alf, who had a persistent lurid curiosity concerning Robbie's catting about.

"Alf?" McManis looked to the fake grain of the conference table as he pondered. Behind the steel door, the night sounds of the city were held at astonishing distance. "Somebody backdoored me on this," Jim finally said. "Alf must have let it slip. Maybe to the local agents on the surveillance. But Sennett knew. And he went around me. He handed me a signed warrant on Friday morning, told me to get Alf to do the installation. No details. He must have used the IRS guys to nail down the probable cause. I didn't understand what he was ticked about." McManis flexed his hand, on which the fingers were slightly clubbed. His usual comfortable manner had worn down. If he was from D.C.and his comments over the weeks had largely confirmed that-he'd been through this before. You ran with the big dogs in that town. Got crackbacked and bushwhacked and cut down at the knees. Still. It wasn't Jim.

"He was sending us a message," Jim said. "Me. And you. About staying on our toes. He wants you inside this guy's shirt from now on. He already said as much. You're with him whenever he leaves home."

Her impulse as always was to defend herself. Robbie had made it sound as if the relationship was long over.

"Then learn the lesson. Anything like this in the future, some mention of other judges, any hints, you better let me know." The rebuke was mildly spoken but it burned through her. "And when he starts talking-" McManis weighed what he was saying. "You've got to try to draw him out. More. See if you can. God knows what else there might be like this."

More. Evon nearly laughed. More and she'd need to borrow a couch from a shrink. Or somebody's wet suit. But McManis's expression allowed no room for humor. Jim's mouth worked around what he was going to say next.

"This isn't the nicest part," he said and looked at her directly, so she didn't miss the meaning. She considered the advice in the strange hush of the building and tried not to shake her head. "It's not easy," Jim said. "UC is the hardest. And you know, Feaver-" Jim shrugged. "I've sort of gotten to like the guy. In his way."

"In his way," she agreed.

McManis smiled. "I like him-" He checked himself there and gave his head, and his boyish do, the tiniest shake. There was a leased car for her in the basement garage, McManis told her. She'd see Feaver in and out the door to his house every day now.

As she drove home, she felt her emotions collecting in a familiar way, sliding into humiliation. She felt hammered down by it, more ponderously now that she was alone. When it came back up again, by the time she'd closed the dead bolt inside her apartment, it had made its inevitable transformation to anger, her ferocious companion. She'd been played! Played by Robert S. Feaver, future felon and full-time slimeball. She was even enraged with McManis, who was doing what bosses do in bad situations, sending her in two different directions at once, asking her to be warier at the same time she was supposed to lead the guy along. They had the wrong girl for that. There wasn't that kind of art to her. If she didn't respect McManis so much she'd have told him so.

"Fucking Sennett," she said aloud. Game player. Powermonger. "I hate that shit." Playing the Mormon girl, she'd reverted for months to the vocabulary she'd used in high school. The curse words resounding around the apartment struck her as childishly amusing. Fucking Sennett. She laughed then. She'd just realized what it was McManis was going to say. About Feaver. At the end.

He was going to say, I like him more than Stan.

At 6 A.M., she was parked outside Feaver's house, blocking the driveway. He didn't ask why. He knew it was coming. For cover, though, they'd still travel in the Mercedes. Settling in, she slammed the door with a powerful heave. He did not look her way as she frumped around in the seat.

"I'm gonna be out here every morning now, bucko. And I'm gonna be seeing your wandering behind through the door every night. And I'm calling every two hours to make sure you've stayed put. I'm even tying a string around your ankle when you go to the potty."

He flirted with a smile, then apparently reconsidered under the circumstances.

"Do you have just the smallest clue how bad you made me look?" she asked.

When he turned, his expression-its harshness-was shocking.

"Cut the crap. I know you dimed me out on this. I know you went right to Sennett when I said I'd had a thing with a judge."

"I only wish I had, Robbie."

"Did you listen in on my phone calls, too?"

"Sure," she said. "Absolutely. I record them on that wire I'm wearing. Sennett's up all night listening to the output."

They were driving. There'd been a frost again last night and the windshields of the cars at the curbs were glazed with what looked like large snowflakes. He made a bitter remark: Everything with her was business.

"You're not gonna do this," she said "You're not gonna embarrass the hell out of me and then try to make me feel bad cause you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar. You're not going to do that, Feaver."

"Hey, I'm a big boy. I took a chance and I lost."

She battled herself. He was always saved by intuition. Because of course there was a piece of her that inevitably needed to explain.

"You barefaced lied to me and now you want an apology?"

"Lied?"

"Didn't you tell me that you'd stopped that stuff?"

"Oh, please."

"Didn't you? What was it you said. `It seems disloyal'?" He'd be single again soon enough. She skipped that part out of sheer mercy.

"What's it to you?"

"Only my job. That's all. Just what I get up every morning to do. I'm lyin in bed last night, ripping the hell out of myself. `How'd you miss it?' Then I realized you'd looked right in my dumb green eyes and told me that whopper."

"You didn't believe it anyway."

"Stop making excuses, damn it! What kind of person are you? How can you just flat-out say stuff that isn't true? That you know isn't true?"

"Aw, don't give me that production number. `Men were deceivers ever.' Shakespeare, right? Everybody lies. `Oh, I love your hair.' `What a great idea.' `The dog ate my homework.' Jesus Christ. Every minute you're living is a lie. Look at you. `My name is Evon Miller. I'm a Mormon girl from Idaho."'

"But that's for a reason. For a good reason." "So, I had a good reason, too."

"Yeah? Fooling around and getting favorable rulings?"

He tried to speak, then stopped. His hands moved first.

"Listen, you know, when I went romping around up on the stage, I always felt like I was trying on things about myself. Little pieces of myself. Seeing if they could be ginned around to fit. Like making stained glass. You can call me a liar, and people do. But at least I've tried. I haven't sat around with the same loony-tune fantasies as everybody else, keeping them in some hot dark box until they start to stink. If you talk, if you tell, if you make the play, if you say, That's who I am, at least it gives you the chance to figure out if you're right."

She thought of a million old sayings. So full of it his eyes were brown.

"And who did you think you were trying to be by b.s.ing me?"

His Adam's apple wobbled.

"Somebody you liked."

She didn't say anything. He was an actor, she reminded herself. An actor. At a stoplight, a woman in the next car was making up her face, sharpening her brows at the moment, as she hiked herself up to the rearview to peek at the results. They drove on quite some time without speaking, the morning burble of two high-powered drive-time jocks filling the car, the pair yelling at each other to revive their audience.